"No adventure ever survives contact with the players," a gamer friend of mine recently said. It is a fact of gaming that players will do unexpected things. The beauty of tabletop role-playing games is the way they allow for creative solutions to problems. The other edge of that sword is the possibility that players will come up with a solution the GM is totally unprepared for. And in some cases, that solution unravels all the GM's nefarious and deadly plans.

In such a situation, the last thing you want to do is end the session in frustration or appeal to your players to choose a different solution for the sake of the game. Players should be rewarded for highly ingenious thinking, not punished.

Here are some common 'break down' moments and how I've dealt with them in the past:

Players Sneak in the Wrong Way:
Sometimes it can be as simple as rearranging the order in which things will happen so that the players still encounter things in an appropriate order. If, for example, they need a certain item on the ground floor to defeat the main evil foe in the dungeons, but they figure out a way to enter through the basement, you can simply change the location of the item for the enemy so the players don't die needlessly in a hopeless battle.

Players With Superior Numbers of Allies: Sometimes players contrive ways to bring a ton of other NPC allies with them to what was to be a final duel. Strategic-thinking players, especially, have a tendency to play it cautious in order to preserve as many resources and assets for the final confrontation as they can. They see beating an enemy with overwhelming force as the smart solution, if the less classically heroic. To ensure that the players and their mini army don't bulldoze your entire set up, you can either beef up the smaller enemies in order to pick off more of their forces early or increase their numbers to compensate for the players' superior numbers. If you are a GM who appreciates brilliant strategy for its own sake, perhaps you could instead consider rewarding the players for their tactical thinking by allowing them to plaster minor enemies in record time. However, if you do so, consider one of the following for the final challenge: 1) If they are to face some final, powerful enemy, make the enemy that much stronger and scarier. 2) Rule that, because the players decided to sweep in with a large, obvious force, their ultimate foe had enough warning to plot an escape. Such a ruling is a fair trade-off that makes strategic sense: by bringing huge numbers to bear, the players sacrifice stealth, mobility, and the element of surprise.

Players Figure Out Things Too Soon: Sometimes a shrewd player will guess, deduce, or research and discover what was to be your entire strategy. They know everything before they ever enter a dangerous area. To keep things interesting, feel free to throw in a couple of unexpected, minor red herrings. After all, no intelligence is 100% accurate to the smallest detail. Even minor obstacles can keep things exciting and keep players on their toes, and it doesn't feel like they wasted all that effort to get information you're just going to make useless.

Players End Up With a Super Item They Weren't Supposed To: Remember that actions have consequences, and that it's impossible to keep huge discoveries totally secret for long. Once word gets out of what the players have at their disposal, they may find themselves being tracked, watched, or even hunted for possessing it. Perhaps the item in question is evil and that evil starts to curse them. Perhaps the players begin to have disputes with NPCs who covet the item or followers and hangers-on who start to slow them down or embarrass them. Since such items are usually stolen, perhaps people related to its former owner come looking to recover it...by any means necessary. This can be tricky if players feel you're punishing them for having something they feel they deserve to keep. If it's clear they love having the item, then just alter future game challenges to account for its presence. Perhaps even provide a few challenges that can ONLY be solved by use of their super-item.

Players Kill Someone They Weren't Supposed To: Again, actions have consequences. If the victim was supposed to be a main ally, such allies most likely have friends and family who will seek restitution and can then become other potential allies who fulfill the same role. If the victim was a main source of information, perhaps the players find clues that yield the same information on the victim's body, among the victim's possessions, from a helpful assistant, or simply scattered in a timely matter throughout the ensuing storyline.

Finally, I have one simple rule when it comes to unexpected actions by the players: if what they did or did not do doesn't strictly matter to the larger objective of the story or campaign, let them do what they like. Chances are, they'll find their own way back to the pre-planned paths to that objective eventually.

Decision Matrix for Games With Many Players

At a recent Pathfinder session, a friend introduced me to a mechanic to aid players in making difficult or complex plans. If your players run across a situation that requires them to chose one among a handful of options and there is differing opinion as to which is the best, you may find this "decision matrix" works well for you.

Advantages include being impartial and democratic, revealing the group's general consensus out of individual responses to simple questions, uninfluenced by input from others. In groups of more than four players, this decision matrix can be especially helpful in streamlining decision making.

The main disadvantage is speed. The decision matrix does take a bit of time to get through, and the more players, the slower it works.

Step 1: Determine the choices at hand. The players know what their goals are, and the dispute should be over the route to achieve those goals. This step takes two parts: identify important factors and identify main choices. Important factors are things like party safety vs. party speed, factors that have to be juggled. Main choices are things like which route to take toward an objective or which approach to use when striking down an unknown foe just over the next hill.

Step 2: List both factors and choices. Write them down on a piece of paper such that they form a grid, which factors down one side and choices along the top.

Step 3: Interview the players. Go around the circle of players and ask each to individually answer. Forbid other players from interfering. Ask each player for their vote on the best course of action for each given factor, and on the second best.

Step 4: Tally the results. The majority decision should be visible. If there is a tie, repeat the process with only those choices that were tied, and ask only for the top choice from each player.

Example:
The players are investigating a mysterious island. They know from earlier reconnissance that there is a supposedly abandoned town on the island's far side that is now active with people, and that the woods between their current location and the town are filled with hostile creatures. They do not know if the people in the town are friends or foes, but they do know that there is a large and dangerous disturbance in a crater southeast of the town. The players cannot reach a group decision after several minutes of decision, so the GM decides to try using the decision matrix method.

She talks with the players and determines that they all agree that all of the following factors are important:
1. The safety of the group.
2. The speed with which they can reach the town in order to warn potentially innocent people of their danger.

There are three possible routes to take to the town:
1. Using the road that leads over the island to the town.
2. Using the most direct overland route through the woods.
3. Sailing the characters' ship around the island to a reef-free bay within sight of the town.

She begins asking each player the following questions:
"Which of the three routes do you think is the safest? Which is the next safest?"
"Which of the three routes do you think is the fastest? Which is the next fastest?"

She begins to tally the answers, asking each player in turn. In the end, she adds up the tallies and determines that the group's general consensus lies with taking the ship around the island. This will sacrifice a good deal of speed, but is much safer than the danger of the woods or the lack of cover on the road.

I hope this helps you to resolve disputes about the next course of action the next time you have a game with a lot of players.

Ways Low Powered Characters Can Defeat Higher Powered Enemies

In order to illustrate what I mean, I am going to use examples from my own recent games. Most of these happened to be Dungeons and Dragons, but the principles involved can be used in any scenario where you're faced with an enemy who is singly more powerful than any one party member on his or her own.

Band Together
A lone wolf has no chance of killing a moose. But a coordinated wolf pack does. Likewise, a coordinated series of strikes by multiple low powered characters against a single target has a better chance of defeating that target than a situation where the characters are scattered and unable to support each other. This involves setting aside some of the personal glory for the sake of the mission, but it can mean the difference between victory and defeat, and often between life and death of a character. In addition, by focusing the attacks of a range of different types of characters on a single target, it's more likely that the variety of threats will prove too much.


For example, our party of 2nd and 3rd level heroes were all attacking a single 10th level cleric. The party consisted of a cleric, a rogue, and a paladin. By ignoring lower-level enemies and focusing all our attention on the evil cleric, we forced him to retreat. After that it was a simple matter of cleaning up the other monsters.

Plan Ahead
Taking on a threat of significantly higher power almost always requires careful planning. Crucial to such planning is knowledge of the enemy. The more you know about your target's capabilities, the better you can tailor your approach. This cannot be stressed enough. Patience and cooperation are the lower powered characters' greatest allies.
For example, our party of 1st level adventurers was faced with eliminating an ogre. Rather than just charging into the ogre's lair and taking it on, we interviewed the NPCs in the town it was marauding to learn its habits and then planned out a trap based on that information.

Use the Environment to Your Advantage
An often overlooked method of leveling the playing field is creative use of what is available. I mean both in a character's inventory of supplies and the surrounding setting. All too often, I believe players are conditioned by video games to limit their options. Being anal about what exactly is in a specific room can provide you with the tools you need to come up with some really creative solutions.
Examples:
As a rogue taking on a higher-powered cleric, I used a concealed lit torch as a weapon and snuck close enough to set the cleric's robes alight.
As a bound and gagged sorcerer trapped in a cage and facing a minotaur zombie, I deliberately tipped my cage over and then took advantage of it's cylindrical shape to trip the zombie.
As a Promethean facing probable execution, I used the metal springs in the mattress of my prison cell's bed as a garrotte to strangle the prison guard.

Enlist Allies
If the number of characters available to take on a threat is too few, enlist the help of NPC allies. Even if they are lower power than you, the sheer force of numbers can tip the balance in your favor. Allies can serve as a delay tactic while you prepare a more powerful strike that might take time to ready. They can provide support in the form of lodging, food, medical aid, logistics, information, transport, and supplies. And they can help to bring down a single powerful foe through a "death by a thousand stings" approach if they attack as a mob.
Example: In the case of my hero party vs. the ogre, we decided to enlist the help of the townsfolk in building a pit trap for the ogre, with some local ale as a lure. We knew the ogre was fond of the town's ale, thanks to interviewing the townsfolk about the ogre's habits, and we knew both the time and place where the ogre was most likely to show up.

Exploit Weaknesses
Sound advice for characters of any level, of course. But doubly so for lower powered characters who cannot afford to make as many errors. Once you have confirmed that your target is vulnerable in some way, I recommend hitting with as much force as you can as fast as you can with an attack designed to exploit that vulnerability.
Example: In a game in which all the characters were kobolds - tiny reptilian humanoids with very power of any kind even at their most dangerous - we managed to destroy an entire fortified human town by exploiting the following weaknesses: flammable buildings, unguarded livestock capable of sewing confusion and chaos when they stampeded, and a poorly guarded water supply that was easily poisoned.

Avoid Combat
Being low powered is not the time to fight honorably or even bravely. It is the time to be devious, dirty, stealthy, and to rely on the wiles of your socially focused character. How do you think the United States won the Revolutionary War? How do you think an army of tribal desert warriors in Afghanistan has been able to keep the most powerful trained army in the world busy for over a decade? As unglamorous as it sounds, sometimes the best way to fight an enemy is not to fight them at all, but to harry, harass, trick, and frustrate them into defeat.
Example: The party were faced with two air elemental guardians, blocking their path toward a magical sarcophagus. My sorcerer used magic to disguise his appearance and posed as their superior, ordering them to let the party pass. It worked, and we were able to obtain our goal that much faster, easier, and without loss of hit points.

Review of Anima: Beyond Fantasy

Anima: Beyond Fantasy is a steam punk fantasy anime-style RPG published in Spain and translated into English. I had a chance to try it this weekend. Let me first say that I am not an anime fan. In fact, I barely consider anime to be an art form. Thankfully, Anima's only obvious nod to anime in-game is the look and feel of the characters and the world, and perhaps some of the pre-generated character back story as well. So even if you're an anti-anime fan, the game is still accessible.

Mechanics: 7/10: Anima operates under a non-percentile d-100 system, which is certainly not the simplest of base systems. But if you're familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, then the character classes and their abilities are all more specialized forms of the hero classes you already know. There were two particular elements I liked about the mechanics. The first was the fact that, in combat, if an enemy attacks you and misses, you immediately get a counter attack. Also, if at any time a target takes combat damage, they cannot declare any "active" actions on their next turn (active actions include pretty much moving, fighting, most skills and most spells). This makes combat much more fluid and interesting, less predictable.

The second element I liked had to do with spellcasting. Anima uses a form of spell points, with each spell in your repertoire costing a certain amount. The twist is that each spellcaster can only spend a certain amount of points per turn. So, if the cost for a spell is higher than what you can spend per turn, or if you want to "beef up" a spell with more power, you'll have to take the time to gather the necessary power. This mechanic worked out seamlessly once I got used to it, and it means that spellcasters have to spend more time strategizing their next moves rather than relying on fireball after fireball.

Game Story and Logic: 5/10: I was not impressed with the game's internal story or logic. Part of this may have to do with the fact that it's heavily influenced by anime, and I don't get most things about anime, especially the plot and the logic. In the first place, the basic premise of the game was rather vague, and since we launched into the game without much preamble as to who we were or what we were supposed to be doing, I can only conclude that the game's storyline is just rather vague and not very relevant.

Ease of Play: 6/10: Mainly because I find a d-100 system not the most intuitive system to try and play in, and also because Anima uses a special combat chart to determine damage dealt in combat. The chart, in combination with the d-100 system, makes doing combat math a real headache and tends to bog everything down.

Overall Rating: 6/10: Anima gets kudos for trying its hand at making a few unique mechanics, and translating a role-playing game from Spanish and yet preserving its playability can't have been easy. But overall, it's a fairly standard and generic fantasy RPG, all the elements of which you could get with an easier game system elsewhere.

Making Combat More Interesting

In my experience, combat is the most complex part of role-playing games. So I can't blame a Game Master for losing sight of everything else but the rules and the numbers. Nevertheless, it's in combat that I see a lot of good game sessions devolve into elaborate number crunching.

The easiest and simplest way to make combat in your games more exciting is to remember that combat scenes are like any other scenes in your game. They require you to describe the actions and characters involved. Every round of combat is like a miniature scene unto itself, and that makes it an opportunity for you to show how a given enemy reacts to a fight, how they attack or defend themselves, what tactics they prefer, and so on.

It's not as hard as you might think to make combat descriptive. Let the dice be your guide. A failed attack can become a hair-splittingly close dodge or a mighty parried blow. An exceptional success can become a major wound that might leave a scar. I'm not suggesting your description impact any game mechanics. It doesn't need to. What it adds is flavor. Ideally, combat descriptions will tie back into the general feel of the game. A high adventure fantasy game might include lots of dramatic maneuvers and lightning fast parries. A gritty horror game's combat might include disturbingly vivid descriptions of gore and blood.

Another way to make combat in your games more exciting is to pre-plan and vary the tactics of the PC's foes. This works especially well if they're going to be fighting a lot of similar enemies. It's okay if you don't know the first thing about real military tactics. Try doing a bit of web research into actual historical battles to give you some ideas, or just think of your favorite action sequences from films and let them inspire you. But varied tactics not only keep the PCs on their toes, they allow different types of characters to show off their strengths instead of just relying on the "bash-and-slash, frontal assault" types.

Realism in Role-Playing Games

If you know too much about how something really works, chances are you won't enjoy a simplified layman's version. There are a lot of elements to any role-playing game that are written with the assumption that players know little or nothing about them. For example, military operations, or piloting a space craft, or Medieval sword fighting techniques. In general, role-playing game systems are designed to simulate the flavor of such things, to make it just real enough to satisfy the imagination, to make one feel as if one really were a military general or space marine or noble knight.

Ironically, it seems the same type of person who deeply enjoys RPGs is also the same type of person who tends to have a deep working knowledge of some element that RPGs are commonly built around. There are military and tactical nerds, history buffs, Medieval warfare enthusiasts, and of course the religious fans of a given fictional setting who can quote the smallest minutiae of trivia. These are the people who, in my experience, become the most dissatisfied with RPGs meant to simulate their beloved interest. Games simply leave too much out for the sake of ease-of-play. It can be doubly frustrating for such a player when they know more about a topic than the Game Master.

What both GMs and topic-enthusiast players have to realize is that, in general, the more "realistic" a game attempts to portray something, generally the less fun that game becomes for everyone else not interested in such things. Things become too frustrating for the unenlightened player because, without any knowledge about how a given element really works, the only reference the player usually has comes from literature and especially movies. And role-playing games have more in common with both of these than with any real-world simulator. The "weight," if you will, of any role-playing game tends to fall against the side of greater realism, for favor of allowing players the freedom to act in-character and engage the game's story.  

Now, there is nothing wrong with a game that attempts to be as realistic as possible. Every game has it's own style, a reflection of the gaming philosophy of the designers and of the target audience the game is trying to reach. Obviously, every role-playing game has to have some level of realism in order to give everyone a common metaphysical grounding. But every role-playing game must also simplify reality to some extent. It's the difference between a game where "bullet proof vests stop bullets" and "bullet proof vests provide a degree of cushioning against ballistic impact so that it is less likely a bullet will cause fatal injury." At the end of the day, I must say as a GM and a game designer that fun has to trump realism. Games must cater to the widest possible audience, and to do that, they have to make sacrifices to make themselves accessible.

Part of the reason that Dungeons and Dragons was the introduction to role-playing games for an entire generation was that it was relatively easy to learn. Even the title tells you exactly what sort of game you're getting into. This is not the sort of game where, for example, a paladin without a screwdriver will be unable to don his armor. It is not the sort of game where every person is either a peasent or a lord, and where females have little to look forward to in life besides marrying well. That's part of the game's appeal: a fantasy game of high adventure and grand deeds, where players can feel like heroes, or at least like bad-asses. Realistic details that would make the game more historically accurate to Medieval Europe would also become a barrier to the main point of the game, especially to new players.

So if you are someone who enjoys role-playing games but is often frustrated by their lack of realism, my humble suggestion is that you find a genre of game that lies outside your field of expertise (if that's possible). That way, you can become swept up in the make believe of it without having the fun derailed when something happens that you know should happen differently. Also, be as forgiving as you can of ignorant GMs. They're doing the best they can to give you a compelling story that you can interact with and make your own, to some extent. They may not know a short sword from a bastard sword, but they just might know how to put a new twist on the damsel in distress that makes that time-worn cliche fresh and interesting again. And that is a talent.

If, on the other hand, you are someone who likes to run role-playing games but is often frustrated when your players are ignorant of setting details or real-world accurate facts, there are two things I would suggest:
1. Become an instructor. If your real passion lies in the accuracy of your game to the real world, then use the game as a medium to teach others about what you find interesting. Games were originally invented as teaching tools, not story-telling devices. If you tell people up front that you want to run a game that accuratley portrays, for example, 17th century France, then those who would be interested in learning about 17th century France are more likely to sign up to play.

2. The same suggestion as given above. Change games to find one where you are as equally ignorant of real-world details as your players. That way, everyone is operating out of the same refrence points, with all their inaccurate flaws and well-known fictional tropes. Yes, the setting may make you yawn or roll your eyes, but think of it as an opportunity to focus on telling a compelling story out of what the game gives you to work with. After all, that's what RPGs are all about: telling stories.

Fanatics: Making a Compelling Villain

In lieu of the recent death of Osama bin Laden, I thought it might be appropriate to take a look at fanatics in role-playing games. Fanatical evil guys are a staple of almost any role-playing game. Whether it's the dark wizard bent on world conquest or the evil scientist with a diabolical vision of grandeur, it's hard to avoid this trope. Nor should it be avoided entirely. But in the tradition of writing good fiction, fanatics are much more disturbing and memorable if you allow the players to partially enter their world, learn about their twisted logic, and see them as complex characters who aren't necessarily insane or evil to the core.

Fanatics believe they are the good guys.

It's easy to think of a fanatical leader as utterly selfish or even gleefully pursuing evil like the Wicked Witch of the West. But real-world villains are more dangerous because they usually honestly believe they are serving the greater good, a greater good no one else seems to see or is too afraid to embrace. It's often easy to give the sense of this by taking some cause of good and pushing it beyond the boundaries of reason.

For example, "Dragons maraud villages and kill hundreds. Therefore, dragons should be slain in the name of justice." Very laudable, right? But what happens when the dragon-slaying champion starts torturing young dragons to learn the whereabouts of their elders? Or starts destroying nests of dragon eggs? What about sacrificing an entire village of innocents in order to lure a single elder dragon into a deadly trap? Or killing all his dragons by means of unwilling, massively poisoned sacrificial virgins?

Fanatics firmly believe the ends justify the means, and believe in their goal so strongly that nearly anything becomes justifiable for the sake of the cause.

Fanatics back up their claims with compelling arguments.

Part of the reason that fanatics attract a following is because they sound so convincing. Most fanatical villains don't work alone, and it's impossible to convince others to work for you if you don't tell them something they want to hear or promise them something they can't resist. Fanatics don't coerce through fear. They seduce. They beguile. They awe. Above all, they persuade. Some do it through sheer passion. Others by sounding totally reasonable.

Just think of all the pseudo-science that white supremacist groups sometimes employ to back up their claims of being a 'master race.' There's no need for a fanatic to overtly lie when they can simply whip up the latent fears and grudges in a given population, focus them on specific targets, and give otherwise ordinary people a seemingly factual basis upon which to justify their hate.

The followers of fanatics honestly believe in the mission, even if their leader does not.

What this means is that fanatical followers will NOT betray their leader. They will fight to the death for their leader. They will resist and even welcome all sorts of coercion and torture and will martyr themselves for the love of the cause. Even if a fanatical leader is killed, her death may spur her followers to even greater devotion to the cause. Now, instead of one archenemy, the players are faced with dozens or a whole mob all intent on avenging the death of their beloved leader.

The more you try to reason with a fanatic, the tighter they cling to their convictions. 

Fanatics and especially fanatical followers are extremely paranoid. Any hint of wavering loyalty or contradictory information is responded to rapidly and dramatically. Usually, the response follows one of these patterns:

• Encouraged strongly to return to the status quo, but done so in a positive way, "as a concerned friend," for instance.
• Suppressed. The information is deleted or destroyed. The disloyal person is forced to keep quiet or is ostracised.
• Discredited. The information is a lie. The disloyal person is a liar or, worse, a planted spy of the enemy.
• Chastised. The information is placed on a 'banned' list or is called malicious and evil. The disloyal persion is sanctioned on an institutional level, perhaps arrested or fired from a job, exiled, forced to apologize on pain of worse punishment. 
• Silenced. Fanatics destroy sources of dissent with quiet violence, not overt slaughter. In order to maintain their pristine image, they usually resort to conspiracies of murder or assassins to deal with 'enemies from within.' It is rare that they whip up a mob to kill an individual or order a mass slaughter in broad daylight. 

At the very least, a fanatic will rationalize away any counter-arguments made to convince them they are in the wrong. People do this all the time in real life: they ignore it, they laugh at it, they pounce on any small weakness in the argument, they question the validity of any references or sources of supporting information that are mentioned. Any of these reactions, magnified dramatically, can make for an appropriate fanatical response.
 
If you follow these guidelines when creating a fanatical following, organization or villain, you will find it makes for a far more sinister challenge for players to overcome.